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Teach the World

What do you get when you combine YouTube, Wikipedia, the WikiWix search engine, and the and the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference? No it’s not a joke, it’s a new website called Nibipedia. Billed out as “a new way to teach the world”, Nibipedia allows users to add articles to a video timeline so that other users can see them. When you watch a “Nibi” (a video tied to Wikipedia articles), you have the video in one pane, a list of “Nibs” (Wikipedia articles tied to the timeline of the content) associated to that video, a reading pane for the articles, and a pane that shows other videos that also link to that article. Nibipedia even gives you definitions of their new lexicon:

Nib n: image + article attached to a video.Nibi n: a stream of interesting nibs “I was up late last night watching nibi.” v: to make nibs and attach them to videos. ex.”On the weekend, I could totally nibi all day.”Nibstream: n: a stream of nibs inhabiting the space under Youtube videos.Nibipedia: n: the place where you can nibi research, learn and teach. Add nibs if you’d, but it’s fun just to watch too.

Launched at the beginning of November, the website is still in Beta and is a little rough, but a fascinating concept and a great mashup of content to create an incredible learning environment. In fact, according to Troy Peterson, Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder, the primary driver for the project was the One Laptop Per Child Project’s two-week “Give One Get One” campaign that launched November 17th. Nibipedia wanted to provide a learning interface for the project that combined two of the biggest free content databases on the Internet, YouTube and Wikipedia.

According to Peterson, however, Wikipedia is only the first content database the site plans to integrate. “Nibipedia is about connecting an idea to multiple types of content,” says Peterson. “We started with the content from the TED Conference because it is some of the best content on the Internet. However, we plan to combine several ‘content channels’ into one simple to use interface.”

“We just thought, how can we get more value out of something people are already doing,” said Peterson. According to co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, Terry Schubring, “There’s an abundance of free content in the Web 2.0 world just waiting for people to put it together. Hopefully Nibipedia is just the beginning of that.”

What’s up next for Nibipedia? “We plan to continue working on improving the work flow and user experience. Also, we plan on adding more sources content and greater ability to customize the user experience.”

As a kindred spirit to YUDU, Nibipedia is an excellent way to make expertise available in new and innovative ways. Any other sites you have seen that combine great content in interesting ways?

Nibipedia.org has open sourced our original code and have begun looking for underwriters to create a prize to make a Youtube + Wikipedia Mashup. The Wikitube Prize. http://www.nibipedia.org

Also, we released a short video that explains our original idea that we weren’t able to create at the time, it is possible now. http://youtu.be/kKM3dZOaumw We’re interested in getting feedback from educators, homeschoolers and students about the proposed app if you can share, it would be appreciated.